Author: Mark Hannam

At the start of this year, my aunt died.  A couple of months previously she had celebrated her one hundredth birthday.  I did not know her well because she lived most of her life in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan.  I first met her in my mid-teens when she returned to the Britain for a visit, her first trip back in thirty years.  In her seventies and eighties, she returned a few times to see old friends and to visit her sister, who is my mother.  I remember her sense of humour, for example, asking advice of my daughter, then in her early teens, on whether she should get a navel-piercing or a tattoo to celebrate her ninetieth birthday.  She told us some entertaining stories about her escapades in London in the 1930s.  It turns out that young women in her day used similar tricks to charm their way into bars and get drinks bought for them when underage as they do nowadays.  In the early 1940s she met, fell in love with, and married a Canadian soldier, who was later injured fighting in Italy.  At the end of the war, she emigrated from her home in South London to Canada, disembarking the boat at Halifax and moving to Rouleau and later Moose Jaw, where she spent most of her life, and finally, five years ago, to a retirement home in Medicine Hat.

Last week, as I was walking along the main road that runs south from Borough Market, I saw a blue plaque fixed to the wall, memorialising the birthplace of John Harvard.  Like my aunt, he travelled from Southwark to North America, although he went three hundred years before her, and not as a war-bride but as a minister of religion.  Unlike my aunt, he died young, aged thirty-one and is mostly remembered now because in his will he left some books and a few pounds to establish a small college in Massachusetts. 

Continue reading “Migrative”

According to Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”  

When I was a student, I thought this to be a harsh verdict on Aristotle and every other major philosopher who came after him, as if precedence in time implied precedence in rank.  I also found it to be an unintentional but nevertheless amusing parody of many philosophy books and papers that I read, in which the amount of space devoted to footnotes or endnotes appeared almost equal to that allocated to the main text.   Some philosophers seemed content to be the authors of series of footnotes.   Later, I came across the sentence which immediately follows that quoted above, where Whitehead continues, “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”.   Now the remark made more sense: it is the richness and variety of Plato’s philosophical interests which impresses, more than his proposed solutions to the many puzzles that he, through the voice of Socrates, draws our attention to.

Continue reading “Doing philosophy down in the docks”

I have been listening to John Coltrane.  More particularly, I have been watching a studio performance by his Quintet from 1961, of his interpretation of the song, “My Favorite Things”, written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein a couple of years earlier. There is much to admire in this old black and white archive recording, including a delightful piano solo by McCoy Tyner, who died last month, and some under-stated yet compelling percussion by Elvin Jones.  Then there is Coltrane himself, the great saxophonist, finding ample scope for virtuosic improvisation within the formal structure of the verses, drawing out many shades of colour and contrast around the melodic line that – seemingly – he alone knew might be hiding there.  Listening to him play is better than eating schnitzel with noodles. 

Continue reading “Arodnap”

When I was a small child, history taught at school comprised a series of stories, each one recounting the great deeds of some famous man or, occasionally, famous woman.  I imagine that each country has its own selection of national heroes and heroines, exemplars for the young, whose exploits are re-told to each generation of children: Robin Hood in England, Joan d’Arc in France, William Tell in Switzerland, and Paul Revere in New England.  And, if you live in Argentina, I guess it will now be Diego Maradona.   

Continue reading “Beckettmas”

A few years ago, I flew to Canada to attend a friend’s wedding.  Towards the end of my stay I lost my mobile phone. There was a time when losing a phone would be nothing more than a moderate inconvenience, since they can be insured, quickly replaced, and have neither intrinsic nor sentimental value. They once were disposable items.  However, in the past decade they have become objects of greater significance owing to the large amount of information they store and the multiple functionality they possess.  We use them to send messages and emails, connect with social media applications and the internet, store contact details and photographs, wake us up in the morning and tell us the time during the day, allow us to pay bills and transfer money, listen to music and watch videos and podcasts, find our current location and the best route to our destination, and, from time to time, we even use them to make phone calls.

Continue reading “Reciprocity”